Nick Pope (1965–2026) was a British civil servant, author and broadcaster who handled UFO reports for the UK Ministry of Defence from 1991 to 1994. He turned that posting into a three-decade media career, was often described as the United Kingdom's top UFO expert, and was billed as the real-life Fox Mulder of The X-Files. He passed away at his home in Tucson, Arizona, on April 6, 2026, aged 60.

Born Nicholas George Pope in London on September 19, 1965, he was the son of George Pope, an aeronautical engineer who directed the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Educated at Lord Wandsworth College, he joined the ministry in 1985, at 19, and worked on financial policy, counterterrorism and policing before moving to air force operations. In 1991 he was posted to Secretariat (Air Staff) 2a, the office known as the UFO desk, where he was the only person assessing reports for defence significance, alongside his other duties. He interviewed witnesses, checked military flight records, consulted astronomers and studied videos. He judged most reports to be misidentifications, hoaxes or delusions, but said about 5 percent defied explanation. He left the desk in 1994 and stayed at the ministry until 2006, ending in the Directorate of Defence Security.

Two cases shaped his public career. In 1994 he reopened the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident and long stressed radiation readings at the reported landing site that he put at up to ten times normal; physicist Frank Close countered in a 1997 television debate that the meter's maker called it the instrument's bottom reading, of little significance. Pope also investigated the March 1993 sightings over Wales and western and central England, reported by police and military personnel but never detected on radar; his report left the objects unidentified, and later analysis attributed the main sightings to the re-entry of a Russian booster rocket. In 2014 he published Encounter in Rendlesham Forest with two of the airmen involved, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston.

His first book, Open Skies, Closed Minds (1996), was a bestseller published with the ministry's approval; in it he raised the possibility that an alien race was acting against humanity, a view he later distanced himself from. The Uninvited (1997) examined alien abduction claims, and he also wrote science-fiction novels and the 2018 thriller Blood Brothers. He consulted on Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds and was among the first at the ministry to use the term UAP. After moving to the United States in 2012 and marrying the anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss, he became a regular on the History Channel's Ancient Aliens and toured with its live show in 2024. In a February 2026 essay for Skeptic magazine he wrote that if President Trump's term ended without disclosure, he would be 99.9 percent convinced there was nothing to disclose.

His wife announced his passing on X. NewsNation correspondent Ross Coulthart called him "a kind and intelligent person," former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal praised his humility, and the psychologist Chris French, his frequent television opponent, wrote a warm remembrance in The Skeptic. Having handled the ministry's UFO reports himself, Pope spent thirty years explaining how a government received and judged sightings, and he was an early advocate of the UAP terminology that now frames official debate.